This post began as an update to the previous but it grew too long.

One of the topics in Tim Burke's post-holiday survey is the insufficiently nuanced nature of environmentalism in general and climate advocacy in particular.

One of the things that frustrates me about the overall public discussion of global warming is that the factionalization of the debate leaves me feeling like I don’t have a team to cheer for. . .

the dogmatism of a lot of environmentalist discourse about global warming drives me nuts in certain ways. Most notably, in the way that extremely specific public policy solutions to the problem get intrinsically coupled to the empirical documentation of the problem, often in a way that borders on dishonesty. . .

Before I find any policy recommendations convincing, I need to have some sense that the recommenders are thoughtful about the nature of complex systems in general, and aware of the fundamental practical and epistemological problems involved in proposing to intervene in their emergent character.

I elided the curtsies to the conventional narrative since they didn't advance the argument so much as clear his throat a bit before whispering heresy. Today's Prometheus post is a bit more full-throated.

In today’s New York Times Stanford’s Ken Caldeira has a thought provoking op-ed on the impact of planting trees on the global climate system. His basic argument is that planting trees is not a solution to rising carbon dioxide levels, even though trees remove carbon from the atmosphere. Although perhaps not intentioned, Caldeira’s op-ed indicates that the approach of the Framework Convention on Climate Change may be fatally flawed. Caldeira ends up, as these discussions often do, focused narrowly on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. . .

Why is it that removing carbon doesn’t have the desired climatic effects? Caldeira explains that there are multiple influences on the climate system, with the radiative forcing of carbon dioxide being only one of them, especially at the higher latitudes. Further, the effects of carbon dioxide are not so large as to overshadow the other effects. In fact Caldeira suggests that the other climate effects are on par with those of the radiative effects of carbon dioxide. . .

Huh? Climate change resulting from greenhouse gases is bad, but the exact same climate change resulting from more trees is good? This is logically inconsistent. If society should indeed be concerned about future climate change because of its impacts on things that people care about, say on California snowpack and water resources, then the specific cause of climate change should not matter for deciding whether or not a problem exists. It is inconsistent to suggest that carbon dioxide-caused climate change is a problem, but land use-caused climate change is not.

Read the whole post to follow the details of Caldeira's convoluted clinging to the standard narrative, while demolishing it.

Burke's post pointed with approval to this Charlie Stross post, Why I am [not] an environmentalist, which has structure and content analogous to other "Why I am [not]" essays with various subjects such as feminism or conservatism, and like them affirms that he really is an environmentalist (or feminist, or conservative etc.) but that it has been done wrong.

The issue, I think, is that political environmentalism — the ideology, as distinct from environmental science — comes with a bunch of baggage attached. We should reduce our carbon emissions in order to reduce levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. We should reduce our consumption. Don't drive, don't fly, don't buy shit. Use a composting toilet. Wear natural fibres. Eat less. Taken to the extreme, the deep greens would have us refrain from breeding and reduce our numbers to a level that could be sustained by agricultural technologies that use only renewable energy. In practice, that means draught horses and oxen. We're talking mediaeval, here. To save civilization, we've got to destroy it.

Where did they get this idea from?

I suspect the answer lies in the religious background of the people who brought us environmentalism as a creed. There's a hair-shirt subtext to much green politics that suggests that pollution is sinful, and because we have sinned, we must atone by subjecting ourselves to physical discomfort. It seems to me that this attitude has its roots in Christianity, by derivation from the Manichean struggle of good against evil. If pollution is evil and is a consequence of luxurious living (itself a sin), then the answer is to do good by eschewing luxury. To many proponents of environmentalism, environmentalism has become a hair-shirt creed of puritanical self-denial that begs the first question: why are we trying to preserve the environment?

There's some merit in this, though it's nonsense to liken it to Christianity since it is a human universal. The Mayans did it long before contact with Christians, and they aren't unusual. Offend the gods and you will be spanked.

Once you reject the religious aspects of green politics, it becomes a lot easier to reason about climate remediation (and to spot when people are talking bollocks). And as it happens, I'm not the only person thinking along these lines. Here's Bruce Sterling on the subject of what to do:

Climate change is not gonna be combatted through voluntary acts of individual charity. It's gonna be combatted through some kind of colossal, global-scaled, multilateral, hectic, catch-as-catch-can effort to stop burning stuff, suck the burnt smoke out of the sky, and put the smoke back into the ground. That's not gonna get done a little green teacup at a time, because we've been doing it for two centuries and we don't have two centuries to undo it.

"Reducing emissions" is a wrongheaded way to approach it. If "reducing emissions" is the goal, then the best technique available is to drop dead. The second-best technique is to go around killing a lot of people. Nobody's got a lighter eco-footprint than a dead and buried guy. He's not walking around leaving footprints: the Earth is piled on top of him.

We're past the point where reduction helps much; we will have to invent and deploy active means of remediation of the damage. But from another, deeper perspective: we shouldn't involve ourselves in lines of development where the ultimate victory condition is emulating dead people. There's no appeal in that. It's bad for us. That kind of inherent mournfulness is just not a good way to be human. We're not footprint-generating organisms whose presence on the planet is inherently toxic and hurtful. We need better handprints, not lighter footprints. We need better stuff, not less stuff. We need to think it through and take effective action, not curl up in a corner stricken with guilt and breathe shallowly.

Climate change is a technologically-induced problem — although elements of it go all the way back to the invention of the technology of agriculture, 12,000 years ago — and it's going to take a technological fix. We need to stop burning hydrocarbons because they're screwing up our environment, but without energy we're going to have short, unpleasant lives: and the whole reason for not screwing up the environment is to have long, pleasant lives. So we need a basket of new technologies for energy (anyone who promises you a solar- or wind-powered monoculture is a crank or a liar or an ideologue) and that's going to mean solar, and wind, and hydro, and nuclear, and a bunch of others. And we're going to need more energy, because you can't pump CO2 down into empty gas fields using a hand pump.

There's merit in this too, though it's nonsense to focus on the energy costs of carbon sequestration as a driver for increased energy consumption. Even if the currently developed countries did curl up in a corner and breathe shallowly energy needs would still rise since the other 90% of the world has no such intentions.

That's also the rot at the core of Sterling's remarks, and those who follow his lead in the fantasy that industrial design will do anything but comfort the wealthy while providing jobs for a small group of marketing oriented hustlers. They are the descendants of the 18th-19th century Arts and Crafts movement that began as a rebellion against industrialization, bundled in some half-baked quasi-socialist clap-trap, and collapsed when it became clear that their admittedly somewhat attractive designs could not be purchased by any but the very rich. Today they are best remembered for interesting wall paper designs.

An army of designers and hair stylists will not help the environment. Designers have the same problem as politicians and journalists: they have no useful role at this point. They can make things worse but they can't make things better. All they are doing is exploiting the situation for personal gain. It's a job not an adventure. They are followers not leaders. They do the backing and filling after others do the breakthrough development that advances civilization. Once the breadboard invention of a capability is done then they can make it small, tidy and cute. This has marketing significance but we shouldn't confuse productization with invention. What we need now is invention.

We need invention because the small improvements of designers aren't enough to matter. They are of individual importance but not social importance, not global importance. For that we need the orders of magnitude improvements that come from doing things in novel ways, not just doing the same old things with greater parsimony or elegance. They are dusting the furniture in a burning house. Dusting is most useful at other times, but dusting is what they know and do. They have the imperturbability of a good butler who doesn't see the gaffes of his employers, or doesn't notice if he sees, or doesn't mention it if he notices, and never gossips about it elsewhere. (As a sometimes ranch butler I know whereof I speak).

Mostly these folks are merely politicians. They publish their rants, have their effete little demos, march around with raised fists, and manage to get paid, laid and otherwise pull their socks up. Good phun, but not interesting or significant in any larger sense. Their approach is good for killing people and breaking things, but of no use at all for the current problem set. Arguably, their methods never were of use and merely made the 19th and 20th centuries particularly nasty while a few creative types did the breadboard work. (For example, Enrico Fermi's "nuclear pile", built in an unused squash court, really was a pile of graphite blocks with some fissionable material cleverly embedded and damped by cadmium rods. He died of cancer at a young age.)

Each of the whispered criticisms of eco-whackoism referenced here and in the previous post are welcome, but they fail to grasp the nettle and speak openly, or take the obvious next step of supporting more useful efforts - not even the concept of more useful efforts. I suspect that these bright and interesting folks have some private thoughts on these subjects, but daren't risk expressing them. None of them are old enough, or young enough, to speak frankly. They are innocent, I have no proof that they dream grand heresy, but it comforts me to think it.